Can identity appeals in party communication or news media influence voter perceptions?

Marvin Stecker

Fabienne Lind

Hajo G. Boomgaarden

Markus Wagner

2024-05-03

Motivation

group identities influence people’s attitudes and behaviours (Conover 1988; Bornschier et al. 2021)
perceived alignment of social groups and political parties (Miller, Wlezien, and Hildreth 1991; Kane, Mason, and Wronski 2021)

How do voters learn these perceptions? How malleable are they long-term?

Party positioning

parties are associated with social groups in peoples’ minds (Titelman and Lauderdale 2021; Elder and O’Brian 2022)
parties can influence this perception to their advantage (e.g., Robison et al. 2021; Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2020)
e.g. by using group appeals are an (electoral) party strategy (Huber 2022; Riethmüller and Franzmann 2023)

News media

news media are the main information source for many citizens (Graber 2004)
media coverage follows different logics and is (to an extent) independent of party positioning (Meyer, Haselmayer, and Wagner 2020)
news media are incentivised to report on electoral coalitions and identities (Schmuck et al. 2017; Hopkins, Lelkes, and Wolken 2023)

They are listening

voters notice parties changing their (ideologica) positions (Fernandez-Vazquez 2014; Plescia and Staniek 2017)
voters update their perception of parties in response to news reporting (Somer-Topcu, Tavits, and Baumann 2020; Jung and Somer-Topcu 2022)

Expectations

The closer

a political party
media reporting

positions a party to a certain social group,

the more likely in-group members of that group will be to associate that party with representing their group’s interests.

Data & Methods

party positions: computational text analysis of press releases
~~media reporting~~: computational text analysis of party mentions in news articles
perceived party-group link: “How closely do you think party X looks after the interests of …”
- panel data from the British Election Study (3 waves, N = 4000+)
- covering: ethnicity, age, education and class

Text Analysis of Party Positions

party press releases scraped from websites
fine-tuned transformer model to extract social group references at the word level (Licht and Sczepanski 2023)
categorisation into eight categories with NLI (Laurer et al. 2024)
aggregation: 3 months prior to survey wave with monthly recency weight (De Vreese et al. 2017)
respondent assignment via exposure question: How often has party X contacted you in the last 4 weeks?
estimating party-crossed within-between models (Bell and Jones 2015)

Results

(extremely preliminary)

What voters think

What parties do

Take-Aways

party communication and media reporting are both important but distinct influences on voters’ perceptions
text analysis and linkage designs can help our understanding
preliminary results:
- parties can influence voters’ perception of social group representation, perhaps irrespective of group membership of the recipients

Thank You For Your Attention!

Marvin Stecker

www.marvinstecker.com

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